Gordon Alexander Buchanan Parks 

In a career that spanned over 50 years, photographer, filmmaker, musician, and author Gordon Parks created an iconic body of work that documented American life and culture, with a focus on social justice, the civil rights movement, and the African American experience.

Born in Fort Scott, Kansas, Parks relocated to St. Paul, Minnesota, as a teenager and began taking fashion photographs for a local clothing store. In 1940, he moved to the South Side of Chicago, where he had a portrait studio at the South Side Community Art Center. A portfolio of images taken in Chicago earned him a prestigious Julius Rosenwald Fund fellowship—the first of the foundation’s grants for African American artists to be awarded to a photographer. In his 1942 application, Parks stated his aim to “sympathetically portray the Negro in his intellectual, professional, educational, social, farm and urban life, constituting thereby, not one strata [sic] of society, but rather a record showing all sides of the life of our people.” That approach would remain a hallmark of his magazine work, his service to the U.S. government, and his later projects in photography and film. 

The Rosenwald award enabled Parks to move to Washington, D.C., for an apprenticeship with the Farm Security Administration. He later became a correspondent for the Office of War Information [OWI]. By 1944 he had relocated to New York City, where he was a freelance photographer for publications such as Vogue and Glamour—work that drew attention to him in these almost exclusively white environments. In 1948 Parks worked with author Ralph Ellison on the first of two collaborations, an unpublished essay titled “Harlem is Nowhere.” That project led him to approach Life Magazine picture editor Wilson Hicks with a story about Red Jackson, a young black man who led a gang known as the Midtowners. On November 1, 1948 “Harlem Gang Leader” was published in Life and earned Parks a position as staff photographer that he held until the early 1970s. He was the first African American hired by the magazine.

Parks completed several groundbreaking assignments for Life Magazine that offered some of the most important documentation of race relations and the civil rights movement. He returned to Chicago twice on such assignments—in 1953 for a never-published story on the Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church, and in 1963 to document two collaborations Black Muslim movement, which was newly headquartered in Chicago. In 1953, Parks also had a solo exhibition at the Art Institute, which featured 51 of his photographs.

Parks’s career extended beyond photography to encompass filmmaking, music, and writing. In 1969 he became the first African American to write and direct a major feature film, The Learning Tree, based on his semi-autobiographical novel. His next directorial endeavor, Shaft [1971] remains an icon of blaxploitation films. Parks continued photographing, publishing, and composing until his death in 2006. Parks was married and divorced three times.  Parks first met Chinese-American editor Genevieve Young [stepdaughter of Chinese diplomat Wellington Koo] in 1962 when he began writing The Learning Tree.  At that time, his publisher assigned her to be his editor. They became romantically involved at a time when they both were divorcing previous spouses, and married in 1973.  For many years, Parks was romantically involved with Gloria Vanderbilt, the railroad heiress and designer. Their relationship evolved into a deep friendship that endured throughout his lifetime.

Parks had four children: Gordon, Jr., David, Leslie, and Toni [Parks-Parsons].  

Parks has five grandchildren: Alain, Gordon III, Sarah, Campbell, and Satchel. 

Malcolm X honored Parks when he asked him to be the godfather of his daughter, Qubilah Shabazz.

He died of cancer at the age of 93 while living in Manhattan, New York City, and is buried in his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas.

Photo on left -
Parks photographed Watson as she went about her day, culminating in his American Gothic, a clear parody of Grant Wood’s iconic 1930 oil painting [shown below].

It served as an indictment of the treatment of African Americans by accentuating the inequality in “the land of the free” and came to symbolize life in pre-civil-rights America. “What the camera had to do was expose the evils of racism,” Parks later observed, “by showing the people who suffered most under it.”

Click here to return to BLACK HISTORY MONTH page

Click here to return to UPCOMING EVENTS page